Parties nearly complete candidate nominations with no wow factors
Candidates have little time to make pledges before April 10 elections
Rival parties have selected their candidates for over 80 percent of the 254 constituencies for the April 10 general elections through their self-professed fair nomination process, but the finalists do not live up to expectations, failing to impress voters.
Analysts said the parties have become narrow-sighted due to their own political conflicts, failing to bring in fresh faces or come up with policies that can actually affect people’s livelihoods.
As of Monday morning, the ruling People Power Party (PPP) fixed its lawmaker candidates for 233 out of 254 constituencies and is expected to soon finish candidate selections for the rest. The main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) has named candidates in 213 constituencies, and its candidate recommendation committee has already finished reviewing preliminary candidates in 244 constituencies.
The two parties’ nomination processes showed stark differences but reached similar results, as their loyalists who stand at the pinnacle of their respective blocs have survived their primary elections.
The DPK suffered extreme internal factional divisions over the fairness of its nominations process, as Chairman Rep. Lee Jae-myung’s reform drive ended up sidelining party members critical of him.
Though Lee said in a press conference on Sunday that his party’s candidate nomination “is bringing out revolutionary results through its fair and crystal-clear process,” the liberal main opposition has already seen a number of heavyweights defecting from the party to join new liberal parties created in protest of Lee’s monopolization of power.
Im Hyug-baeg, the head of the DPK’s candidate recommendation committee, said the party will replace a record-high 45 percent of serving lawmakers in the nomination process, but most of those snubbed were figures hostile to the pro-Lee faction. Except for Rep. Ko Min-jung, who is a former spokesperson for previous President Moon Jae-in, all of the DPK’s leadership members at least got their chance to compete in the primaries.
The PPP also had a similar outcome. The ruling party’s candidate nomination process has been proceeding without major controversies, as the party has favored serving lawmakers.
The party’s candidate recommendation committee assumes that 35 percent of serving lawmakers will be replaced when the nominations are completed. It will be 7 percentage points lower than that of four years ago, when the PPP’s predecessor, the United Future Party, replaced 43 percent of serving lawmakers during its nomination process.
In doing so, the party’s loyalists to President Yoon Suk Yeol took the mainstream of the roster. Reps. Kweon Seong-dong, Yoon Hanhong and Bae Hyun-jin, who served in key posts in the president’s presidential election camp in 2022, earned their candidacy without primaries. Former Deputy Prime Minister Choo Kyung-ho and former Unification Minister Kwon Youngse also easily punched their ticket to the elections, skipping their respective primary elections.
“We have replaced approximately 30 percent to 35 percent of serving lawmakers in successful general elections in the past, seeking balance between reform drive and stability,” Rep. Jang Dong-hyeok, the PPP secretary-general, said.
As the DPK is dragged down by factional infighting, the PPP’s stability is becoming a windfall in polls, but there is also criticism that the party is not being aggressive enough in recruiting fresh faces.
In a Korea Times survey released on Wednesday, voters showed negative responses to the rival parties’ candidate nomination process.
In the poll conducted by Hankook Research from March 4 to 5, 56 percent of 1,002 respondents said the DPK is not doing well with its nominations, while 36 percent responded positively. Negative responses also outnumbered positive ones in the same question for the PPP — 48 percent to 43 percent. Further details are available on the National Election Survey Deliberation Commission’s website.
“The biggest problem observed in the rival parties’ candidate nomination processes is that they are too slow,” said Cho Jin-man, a politics professor at Duksung Women’s University. “With less than a month left until the general elections, the parties are yet to finish naming their candidates due to their own political conflicts. Is there any time for candidates to set up their policy promises for their constituencies?”
Cho criticized the DPK for spending its time on its internal conflicts over Chairman Lee’s leadership, but the PPP, which has already established the pro-Yoon faction’s dominance months ago, also wasted its time butting heads with the DPK over electoral rules. This left very little time for candidates to explore ideas to improve the public livelihood of their constituencies.
For example, the National Election Commission plans to publicize each party’s top 10 policies in official documents on Thursday, but the PPP only revealed its top 10 policy pack on Monday, while the DPK has yet to do so. Their policy packs are also similar, both setting Korea’s low birthrate as the top priority.
“Candidate nominations may create controversies, but they will be forgotten when the elections near,” Cho said.
“The real question is whether those candidates have serious considerations for issues of their constituency and are ready to fight for the interests of their region in the next four years. If the rival parties stay narrow-sighted and obsessed with their political battle of who is judging who, the room of policies will continue to shrink by the partisan rationale.”